Show
someone a ten-side die,
and you will either get an acknowledging smile or a confused frown. Along
with MOO’s, Magic: The Gathering and EverQuest, Role-Playing Games seem
to be almost unheard of outside certain circles. It is hard for
role-players to explain what RPG’s are to non-gamers; and it is even
harder for non-gamers to understand what the appeal of RPG’s is. It is hard to understand RPG’s without ever
participating in them because RPG’s are not just
a game; they are an experience. And the ten-sided die, among other things,
has come to be symbolic of this collective experience.

My main interest in RPG’s is in its interface with our individual
personalities. I am interested in finding out how our personalities
influence how we shape our characters or what we are trying to get out of
the game. Too often we project our own rationale for enjoying RPG’s onto
others, and we are unaware that other reasons abound. Why do
some players consistently choose the same character classes while others
never choose the same one twice? Why do some players like to role-play
reflections of themselves while others prefer to role-play opposites? Are
women attracted to RPG’s for the same reasons that men are? My main
concerns lie in isolating the personality traits that separate one kind of
behavior or preference from another. For example, in seeing the
differences between player-character resemblance, I am interested in
finding out what personality factors are influencing those differences.

Past studies on RPG’s have mostly focused on identifying how
gamers differ from non-gamers on certain personality scales. Most of these
studies have yielded very few differences. It has been shown in at least
two studies that role-players score higher in factor Q1 (Experimenting;
liberal; freethinking) on the Cattell 16 personality scale than
non-gamers (Simo’n, 1987; Carroll,Carolin, 1989). No other deviations were found in any other factor
when compared to an average sample. Another study where gamers were
analyzed in terms of feelings of powerlessness, worthlessness and
isolation found no significant deviation from a non-gaming sample, except
in the area of “cultural estrangement”. Cultural estrangement in the
study was defined as awareness and interest in popular entertainment, and
gamers were found to score lower than non-gamers. On the other hand, they
also found that non-gamers reported a higher sense of
“meaninglessness” than gamers (DeRenard, Manik, 1990). Abeyta and
Forest (1991) used a questionnaire on gamers and non-gamers measuring
self-reported criminal behavior. Again, no differences were found except
that non-gamers were found to score higher on “Psychoticism”, which
however was not a reliably measured factor. Gamers and scholars familiar with
why RPG’s gained a negative image in the media in the past 20 years will
probably understand what the motivation behind these studies were. (A good
historical account can be found here – The
Attack on Role-Playing Games)

Douse and McDougal (1993) performed a study on a fantasy
Play-by-Mail game where the gamers were compare to non-gamers and gamers were found to score higher in introversion, lower
in emphatic concern, and were less feminine and androgynous on the BEM
Sex-Role scale. But because the sample of gamers in the study were all
chosen from such a peculiar subset, I do not feel the study is
representative of RPG gamers in general. I also think that the sample is
biased in several other ways because computer/email preference is
confounded with role-playing. In particular, people who prefer to socialize
over email are probably more introverted than an average sample regardless
of whether they are role-players. Furthermore, Play-by-Mail RPG’s are
very different from the traditional table-top face-to-face RPG’s.

The study that motivated mine was one done by Jennifer Mulcahy
(Role
Playing Characters and the Self). Although
her paper seems to have been written for a Brandeis College Psychology
class, never published professionally, and is not written in formal APA
style, the data that Mulcahy found and the ideas she expressed were intriguing
and refreshing. This was mainly because she was trying to understand differences
within gamers rather than differences between gamers and non-gamers.

Mulcahy’s
study consisted mainly of a two-part email survey, where her second survey
followed up on the most detailed and elaborate responses from the first
survey. She divided her respondents into male/female and
introverted/extroverted factors. Altogether she chose 8 final respondents with 2
in each combination. Mulcahy did not use any statistical
tool in her analysis and used quotes as her main support.

Before
going on to what she found,
here is how she defined Introversion and Extroversion in her study: “I
would define an introvert to exist primarily within themselves, while an
extrovert exists more within the realm of the outside, with interactions
with other people being a main focus in their life.”Here are the main differences she found:

Introverts:

-
Use RPG space as a safe lab to try out things they would otherwise
not do in real life, both physically and emotionally. They are
expanding who they are.

-
The character is an extension of the self, or an improvement of the
self.

-
Empathy with their characters, shown through alignment. Introverts
would not play alignments that differ from their own

Extroverts:

-
Empathize less with their characters.

-
See the character as different from their own personalities, which
is what makes the characters exciting for them.

-
Are more akin to actors and their characters their masks.

-
Do not care if character alignment is different from their own moral
outlook.

Although based on a very small sample and no statistical tests
could be used, Mulcahy’s ideas provided one set of correlations which
could be tested out with a larger sample. Along with Introversion and
Extroversion, I was interested in several other factors that might affect
game play behavior and preferences. The main ones include: gender, age,
self-image, other personality factors as well as the sense of personal
growth and the character as self-idealization which carry over from
Mulcahy’s study.